I can’t remember addresses. I have always wondered why God made me that way, but now I am beginning to understand.
Hugh can give directions to where anyone has lived in the surrounding district in the past seventy years. It’s easy for him even though he is as dyslexic as I am. But I can’t even retain the addresses of any of my four children.
When I was a child my parents wanted us to hide God’s word in our hearts, so they encouraged us to learn scripture. Like Paul’s young friend, Timothy, I spent many, many hours at my mothers knee, learning the word of God. Mom would actually pay us a penny a verse to memorize scripture, and I worked hard at it.
There was just one catch, and for me it was a big one. We had to be able to say where it was found in the Bible. In other words, we had to remember it’s address, and although I was good at memorization, I just couldn’t remember the reference. I still only know the addresses of a few verses such as John 3:16 and Romans 3:23 and 1John 4: 7 and 8 even though most of the Bible is very familiar to me.
And yet, I just realized today lately that God had a definite purpose in creating me this way. As strange as this may seem, this trial has been my blessing.
The Lord has various ways of speaking to His children. Each of us are different. Each of us learn to hear His voice in a way that He chooses for us. This is how it usually happens with me:
There may be a question on my heart, or something may have happened that is bothering me. I hunger to hear from my Savior. I randomly open my Bible, and He speaks to me through the verses I read. It may be a passage of scripture that is very familiar to me, but I would not have remembered it, or if I had, I would not have known where to find it. Every time this happens, and it happens often, I am awed by how clearly He has spoken to me, and how He has done it without my ability to know where to look.
Many times I am in the wrong, and He uses this means of communication with me to correct me. Other times, He assures me through the scripture that what I am feeling is Him and He is leading me. And through it all He has been teaching me to listen and obey His voice.
Lately God has put a special burden on my heart to be able to minister in some way to the body of Christ. But when God gives you a gift, it isn’t always easy to follow through with how He wants you to use it. It’s one thing when the Holy spirit uses the gift to speak a word of correction to me. That is actually much easier than what I was asked to do which was to pass on a word to someone else.
Thank you God for even the hard tasks!
For the previous post see: Failure
For the next post see Do we need to Look Back on the Sad part of our Journey
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